No glove love: AFL bans sticky fingers

THE AFL is set to ban six types of gloves after a report found they offered players an unfair advantage.

Collingwood centre half-forward Travis Cloke and his new teammate Quinten Lynch are among players to have used gloves that will be prohibited, Fairfax Media reports.

An investigation commissioned by the AFL and carried out by Melbourne's RMIT University found that only four of 10 gloves tested did not provide players with an unfair advantage.

Three Nike gloves - Vaporjet 2.0 Football Receiver, the Magnigrip Elite Remix 2.0 and the Superbad – were rejected, along with the Under Armour Blur II, Ironclad Box Handler Safety and Gilbert Rugby gloves.

Cloke uses Nike gloves and Lynch, while at West Coast, has worn an Ironclad glove.

"Some gloves have now been identified as falling into this category and under the AFL's discretionary powers will no longer be permitted to be worn.''

The introduction to the report said, ''In the 2012 premiership season approximately 10 AFL players regularly wore gloves by choice during league matches, and a further 10 players wore gloves for at least one game for injury reasons.

''The AFL is currently concerned with the potential competitive grip advantage gained by players who wear gloves against opponents who do not. The primary aim of this investigation was to recommend an appropriate maximum legal grip level for gloves utilised by players in the AFL competition, to avoid a significant competitive grip advantage.''

The report found that in dry conditions the high proportion of silicon on the palms of the six banned gloves provided significantly higher average grip than the bare human hand across four tests.

In wet conditions, only the Ironclad and Under Armour provided slightly greater grip than the hand.

''By merging the benchmarking for dry and wet conditions, the overall classification is driven by the results in dry conditions. In other words, the results for wet conditions do not generate any further glove models that exceed human performance,'' the report said.